The measurement of football

The start-up Kinexon has developed a new technology to capture motion data and conquered first the US sports world and then football. Now the Munich-based company is increasingly making inroads into industry.

There might not be many companies doing business with both Gianni Infantino and Oliver Zipse. Switzerland's Infantino has headed football's world governing body Fifa for five years, while Zipse has been at the helm of carmaker BMW since 2019. Two worlds that until now, at most, TV entertainer Stefan Raab brought together at his autoball slapstick events.

But Munich-based start-up Kinexon is achieving something similar. With its real-time localization technology, the company equips both large industrial companies like BMW and sports organizers like Fifa. Last week, the company proudly announced that it was now a partner of the federation when it comes to measuring football in terms of data and making it easier for coaches, players and fans to analyse.

"In a way, we have developed a basic technology," co-director Oliver Trinchera proudly explains. He had developed the idea for the product, which Kinexon successfully sells today, together with Alexander Hüttenbrink, whom he met at the Technical University of Munich. "We were at the Allianz Arena together one day and noticed how much effort goes into data collection there," he recalls. But what was recorded there, he says, was on the one hand very inaccurate and on the other very time-consuming: "In some cases, a person had to follow the players' movements on a screen with a mouse."

Hüttenbrink and Trinchera quickly came up with an approach to simplify this process. They developed a sensor that players wear on their bodies. With the help of devices installed on the sidelines, this allows the movement data from all athletes to be collected, processed and analyzed with pinpoint accuracy.

An elegant solution at first glance. But anyone who follows football knows how allergic the scene is to change. Coaches, for example, whose coaching went beyond "go out and play football" have long been derided as "laptop coaches". Other sports are more receptive to new technology. "That's one of the reasons we went to the U.S. first with our product," Trinchera says to himself. This is a bigger market, he says, with greater affinity for technology. However, it also has a lot of competition. "In the beginning, we were told we wouldn't have a chance there," Trinchera says. But the move overseas paid off; within a year, Kinexon equipped three-quarters of the NBA basketball league with its technology. The US ice hockey league NHL followed suit, as did the National Football League. With these successes behind it, the breakthrough in Europe was also achieved. "In the meantime, around 50 percent of the Bundesliga clubs are also among our customers," says Trinchera.

Given the benefits the founder lists for his technology, that seems only logical. "Players can use our technology to prevent injuries, coaches can improve tactics, fans get a whole new insight into the game," he explains. At Kinexon, there is a one-stop shop for all steps of the data processing process, the collection, the presentation and the analysis.

The next step is the industrial sector. There, Kinexon wants to use its technology to help make Industry 4.0 a reality. "Even on a factory floor, there are many things in motion, and locating and prescribing them helps with automation," Trinchera says. For example, he says, Kinexon's technology can be used to tag transport robots or pallets, among other things, to make processes more efficient. "In theory, we can even network every screwdriver."